1:05

'1:05' is the kind of love song that argues with the world by standing very still. Released in May 2017 as part of The Black Skirts' third album TEAM BABY, it sits inside a record largely concerned with youthful affection, friendship, and the small rituals that hold people together. Jo Hyu-il, who records as The Black Skirts (검정치마), tends to write romance as a stubborn private agreement, and this song is a clear example: the title itself, '1:05,' names the exact minute the singer would like time to stop.

The opening lines set up the couple as deliberately anachronistic. They love each other 'like a black-and-white film,' expressing things easily and quickly, never bothering to say anything they do not mean. When something is missing, they stay up all night about it. The picture being drawn is of two people who treat feeling as the first language rather than a translation, and who are willing to be unglamorous and a little out of date about it.

The second movement turns outward. Other people might disagree with how this couple operates, but it does not matter, because, as the song puts it, they are 'the same tempo, different songs.' That phrase is the conceptual hinge of the lyric. It admits the two of them are not identical, that they hear different melodies, but insists they are moving at the same speed. It is a more honest image of compatibility than most pop songs offer.

From here the song sharpens its complaint. The narrator acknowledges that he and his partner should still be clumsier and more honest, but the people around them have become 'like machines,' calculating through repetition, always prepared. Against that backdrop of rehearsed adulthood, he tells his lover that he had been loving her more each day for a different reason. The past tense ('사랑했었고') is quietly important; it positions the verse as a kind of summing up, as if he is taking stock of an accumulation before naming what comes next.

What comes next is the song's central image. Now, he says, he looks only at her, like a clock stopped at 1:05. The metaphor does a lot at once. A stopped clock is broken, but it is also faithful: it shows the same time forever. In a song that has just finished criticising people who run on schedule, choosing a frozen clock as the emblem of devotion is pointed. Love here is not a process of keeping up; it is a refusal to keep moving.

The final section pulls the camera back to loneliness. On days without her, he just waits for the hours to pass somehow, and wonders who could see him now that he has turned transparent. The transparency line is the most affecting moment in the lyric. If the beloved is the only thing he looks at, then in her absence he is not just sad; he is unseen, and possibly unseeable. The stopped clock and the invisible man are two versions of the same idea: a self that only registers in the presence of one other person.

Why it lingers

In the context of TEAM BABY, an album often read as a love letter to a particular kind of unguarded young romance, '1:05' is the track that articulates the philosophy underneath the mood. It explains why the rest of the record sounds so committed to small, sincere gestures: because the alternative, in this song's view, is the mechanical, prepared affection of everyone else. That argument, plus the elegance of the stopped-clock image, is why Korean indie listeners have kept returning to the song years after release. It gives a name and a time to a feeling most love songs only gesture at.